Answers

An org/project that basically provides easy access to a whole bunch of vetted remote talent for EA organizations.

Our ability to scale current direct workers seems important, and one possible way is by augmenting them with lots of remote help. The costs to set up contractor relationships are considerable, so it often doesn't make sense to set up a relationship if an organization would just use it for themselves.

This organization would interview & organize work with many specialized skillsets, and help provide them on demand.

How similar is this to what BERI already does for X-risk organizations? I know they help organizations find contractors for research and web design, and I think they've contracted other types of work in the past.

There are typically many contractors to choose from, and it's difficult to evaluate their quality. For instance, if you want a virtual assistant, it may take several interviews and trials until you find one you like.

I'm not sure what kinds of suppliers you are referring to. If it's simple things like, "buy paper from this company on Amazon", that's typically simpler. The reviews are more indicative of performance and there are often fewer alternatives.

One difference is that orgs can share contractors, but not employees. For instance, my designer only spends around 1-3 hours per week, so has lots of time to help other groups, like EA groups. I'm thinking of low-time, skill-specific workers (the jobs in that list would all only work a few hours per month or similar)

This fiscal sponsor org would get to learn a lot about what different EA aligned donors do and don't like donating to, so you could imagine it providing a helpful service to donors (and EA orgs) of suggesting them orgs that they may be interested in checking out, based on their donation patterns. I could imagine this being appreciated by the donors given that it could have enough data points to make genuinely useful recommendations when those opportunities arise.

CPA’s and attorneys who specialize in nonprofit organizations routinely charge $2,500–$5,000 for preparation of IRS Form 1023 applications for small organizations, and $6,000-$15,000 for more complex ventures.

The following two firms used to post public quotes on the order of $2-3k in 2018 (it seems they've taken down the public quotes):

Interesting. This came from chats I had with an attorney. That said, they were based in SF, so maybe their prices were higher. I also asked how much it would cost to do "everything", which I think meant more than strictly file the IRS Form 1023. I believe there's a lot of work that could be done by either yourself or the attorney, and I would hope that in many cases we could generally lean more on the attorney for that work.

Give out student loans at ~market rates to EAs, with work that is high-impact but lower-than-counterfactual-salary counting as credit towards the loans.

Many talented EAs spend time in college or graduate school TA-ing to save money, or let financial constraints influence their trajectory. It seems risky to just throw money at people with a long time horizon of pay-off, and the risk that they'll just turn around and use that PhD to do unaligned work. This project would require an initial source of funds (perhaps even a traditional bank loan), and a funder that would be willing to commit to pay off the loans once they were satisfied with the impact of the post-graduation work of the debtor.

I believe this idea has been kicking around in my head after a conversation with Amy Labenz.

The larger loan was to someone vouched for by a respected member of the community and was to help cover educational expenses. The person wasn't able to find a job, and I didn't get any money back. The smaller loan was not for educational expenses and went to someone not vouched for, and got I got about a third back.

Lending money to students may be a good idea. The standards of hits-based giving may be more relevant than the standards of finance, and a high default rate may be tolerable. I just want people to know that they may not get their money back.

While I like this idea, I'm kind of surprised it reached the top here. I'm curious; do other commenters have come across many people who this would have been helpful for? Can people describe these cases a bit, along with what kind of loan setup would have been most useful?

I wasted several years doing dead-end minimum wage jobs to pay for my degrees, chose a less prestigious university to do them at due to their lower fees, and still had to take a leave of absence halfway through my master's partly for financial reasons. Even a regular loan with a reasonable rate of interest would have been fine - the fees in the UK aren't that high for domestic students (~£5-16k for a whole master's course) - but at the time the UK government wasn't giving postgrad loans, and even now they are capped at about 10k so you have to find your living costs from elsewhere. A loan of 3-10k would have added a couple of counterfactual years of EA-focused work to my career.

There have been several attempts at making public cost-effectiveness models, but they are often made by people who are working on the relevant research. For instance, organization in area X making an estimate to show that X is cost-effective.

It would be nice to have another agency agree to make their own models, or to go through existing models and check them for validity, similar to a penetration tester.

A website to deter rogue individuals from developing ideas to ‘destroy the world’ by showing that it's just a very bad idea given their values (e.g. A failed attempt will only make the world worse). The website would specifically target people visiting pro-extinction websites or searching the internet for things like ‘how to destroy the world’.

This project would require a very delicate approach and ideally would attract very little attention from people uninterested in destroying the world. We don't want to give anyone bad ideas. The text on it would require careful phrasing. The project probably would need buy-in from knowledgeable stakeholders (FHI, CSER, FLI, EAF, perhaps even the CIA?), a secure website, and very careful targeting.

To add a bit here; I think there are a bunch of small projects coming up (like all those funded by the Long-Term Fund. They could probably use several kinds of infrastructure. An incubator could be nice, but there could also be other kinds of services provided without quite that specific setup.

First off all, I thought those 4 items are a useful list of what you referred to as infrastructure for small projects.

On offering Asana Business:

We are now offering Asana Business teams at 90% discounts (€120/team/month) vs. usual minimum cost. This is our cost price since we're using the a 50% Nonprofit discount, and assign one organisation member slot per team facilitator. The lower cost is a clear benefit to the organisations and groups that determine to move to Asana Business

I'm working with ops staff from RethinkCharity and Charity Entrepreneurship (and possibly Charity Science Health) to move to a shared Asana space called 'Teams for Effective Altruism' (along with EA Netherlands and EA Cambridge). Not set in stone but all preparations are now in place.

This doesn't yet answer your question of why I particularly thought of Asana. Here are some reasons for why to work on building up an shared Asana Business space together:

Online task management is useful: I think at least half of the EA teams >5 people running small projects would benefit from tracking their tasks online for remote check-ins. For instance, when it's hard to travel to say a meeting room once a week, or you need to reliably carry out nitty-gritty ops tasks where it feels burdensome for a manager to ask 'Have you done this and this and this?'. At EA Netherlands, a lot of the project delays and time wasted seemed to emerge along the lines of someone feeling unclear of what was expected/endorsed of their role, being aware of update X, waiting for person Y to confirm, or forgetting/having to remind about task Z. It seems to make common-sense to avoid that by creating a 'single place of truth' where team members can place requests and update each other on progress asynchronously.

Facilitate onboarding of teams: Leaders of small projects seem to experience difficulty in getting volunteers to building the habit of updating online tasks in the first months, even if most would agree on reflection that it's worth the switching cost. In surveying EA regional groups in northern Europe, the one reason organisers kept mentioning to me why they weren't using task software came along the lines of them previously excitedly trying to track tasks online but volunteers forgetting to update their tasks a few weeks later. Both EA Netherlands and EA Oxford flopped twice at using Trello. My sense is they would have succeeded more likely than not if someone took up the role of facilitating team members to use the platform in ways that was useful to them, and reminding them to update their tasks weeks down the line. Part of the Asana team application process is assigning a facilitator, who I can guide from within our shared space.

Asana Business is top-notch: I personally find Asana Business' interface intuitive and well-ordered, striking a balance between powerful features and simplicity. External reviews rate Asana around 4-4.5 out of 5. Having said that, some EA teams seem to have different work styles or preferences that fit other platforms better – I've heard of people using Trello, Nozbe, Notion, GSheets, or even just NextCloud's basic task board.

Asana is an unexploited Schelling point for collaboration: A surprising number of established EA organisations use Asana: the Centre for Effective Altruism, RethinkCharity, Founder's Pledge, Centre for Human-compatible AI, Charity Entrepreneurship, Charity Science Health, 80,000 Hours(?), and probably a few I haven't discovered yet. That's an implicit endorsement of Asana's usefulness for 'EA work' (bias: Dustin Moskovitz co-founded it). Asana staff are now making their way into the Enterprise market, and intend to developing features that enable users to smoothly start collaborations across increasingly large organisational units (Teams...Divisions...Organisations).

Passing on institutional knowledge to start-ups: In a call I had with a key Asana manager, he randomly mentioned how it would be great to enable organisations to coordinate across spaces. I don't think we have to wait for that though. When EA Hub staff could offer Asana teams to local EA groups in our shared space, coach them by commenting on projects/scheduling check-in calls, and stay up to date of what's going on. Likewise, Charity Entrepreneurship could offer Asana teams to the charities they incubate and continue checking in with and supporting the start-up leaders coming out of the incubation program. People could also share project templates (e.g. conference/retreat organiser checklists), share standardised data from custom fields, etc.

So of your infrastructure suggestions, that seems to cover operations support and coaching/advice.

To make sharing the space work, we'd have to close off short-term human error/malice failure modes as well as tend to the long-term culture we create. Downsides of connecting software up to discuss work smoothly is that it's also easier for damaging ideas and intentions to cross boundaries, for people to jostle for admin positions, and for a resulting homogenous culture is build upon fragile assumptions of how the world works, and what the systematic approaches are to improving it.

"coaching to entrepreneurs starting on projects" is another one; it could be that there is a lot of coaching you could do, and if so, I would expect that there is still more value there in total than with Asana. By "portfolio of similar wins" I meant other similar things. The items in my original list would count. Also, maybe helping them with other software or services as well. There are lots besides Asana.

Thank for clarifying 'the similar wins' point. You seem to imply that these coaching/software/ops support/etc. wins compound on each other.

On the shared Asana space, I'll keep checking in with the EA Netherlands/Rethink/CE coaches working with EA groups/charity start-ups on how time-(in)efficient/(in)convenient it is to keep track of team tasks with the leaders they are mentoring.

From my limited experience, a shared coaching GDoc already works reasonably well for that:

Upside: Everyone uses GDoc. Easy to co-edit texts + comment-assign questions and tasks that pop up in email inbox. On the other hand, the attentional burden of one party switching over to the other's task management system to track say biweekly check-ins over half a year doesn't seem worth it.

Downsides: GDocs easily suck away the first ten minutes of a call when you need to update each other on two weeks of progress in one swoop. It also relies on the leader/coach actively reminding each other to check medium-term outcomes and key results. This 'update/remind factor' felt like a demotivating drag for me in my coach or accountability check-ins – all with people who I didn't see day to day and therefore lacked a shared context with.

The way you arrange the format together seems key here. Also, you'd want to be careful about sharing internal data – for Asana, I recommend leaders to invite coaches comment-only to projects, rather than entire teams.

On other software or services, curious if any 'done deals' come to mind for you.

Regarding your forecasting platform, I'm curious if anything comes to mind on fitting forecasts there with EA project planning over the next years.

A small battalion of people who generate positive interactions when EA comes up on social media.

I read most of the tweets anyone ever writes that mention EA. Sometimes, I'll intervene when I see an inaccurate statement from someone who means well and try to offer a cheerful correction. Or I'll jump into a conversation that's gone south and make a joke to lighten the mood. As one person, I'm not going to shift the tone of an Internet's worth of conversations, but...

...well, what if people knew of EA as "the nicest, most helpful people on the internet"? They might hate our ideas, but what if they couldn't help but admire our honesty, our charitableness, our kindness?

(I've seen Kelsey Piper convert multiple people toward EA positions on Tumblr through relentless application of the virtues above, so maybe I just want an organization full of Kelsey Pipers?)

I share this concern. I think this would be very hard to do, and I'd only want to see it happen conditional on there existing enough people with the skills to pull it off. Kelsey Piper exists, which means this kind of work is possible, but I don't know how well sincerity can be taught.

I think this could be cool, but agree that the people should be pretty good. Perhaps it would work better with 1-3 "ambassadors" who are specifically chosen for being able to do this well, and do it full-time.

I wouldn't be as enthusiastic about random people trying this with lots of important people online, due to the complexity.

A multiple-day event in which people (mostly EA's) work to solve a set of problems. These problems can be in any cause area, as long as a solution could plausibly be cost-effective.

Organizations could send in problem cases, or participants could identify their own. In fact, this thread might already give a nice list of possible problems/solutions to work on!

The event can be made more complex by adding in rounds, which filter the good solutions from mediocre and bad solutions. In further rounds, promising teams/individuals could be matched with a coach. The best few ideas get funding to take the next step in solving the problem (e.g. creating a minimum viable product).

After competing in multiple hackathons, I've found that they rarely produce useful work. It's actually quite a bit of work to extract and formalize problems (from organizations). I feel like around EA, I'm not sure how many problems there are suitable to hackathons.

That said, they can be good for networking / experimenting with working with different groups. I'm happy I went through the hackathons I did, but more for skill building than direct output.

I think overall I'd expect them to be a decent use of a weekend, but would expect the output to be similar to that of other hackathons (i.e. not that much, so just expect that). ~2 days isn't that much, both in costs and expected benefits.

I'm quite surprised to see this is the least upvoted of my ideas, as I thought it is a nice meta-suggestion and addresses a big constraint: capacity and coordination to get projects off the ground. Looking at the other suggestions, one think that jumps out is that they are very concrete and have a narrow scope - this makes it easier to see the value and easier to evaluate success, while this project is wider and has a lot left to fill in.

I didn't see the comment previously (until I saw these comments asking about why it hadn't been upvoted just now). I would speculate that one reason might be that the term 'Hackathon' is often associated just with programming or similar activities (which would be much less interesting than a general EA collective problem-solving event) and so people might have skimmed over it without reading the details.

I didn't see this comment earlier. Having read it, this seems like one of the best ideas here and certainly worth trying. I would also be curious to see if there are strong arguments against this idea.

Collection and curation of EA content from across the internet in a way that's accessible to newcomers, easily searchable, and will last for decades (at least). Seems like it wouldn't take that long to do a decent job, doesn't require uncommon skills, and could be pretty high-value.

I would be open to paying people to do this; message me if interested.

There are two functions I'm looking for: the "archive/index" function, and the "sequences" function. The former should store as much EA content as possible (including stuff that's not high-quality enough for us to want to direct newcomers to); it'd ideally also have enough structure to make it easily-browsable. The latter should zoom in on a specific topic or person and showcase their ideas in a way that can be easily read and digested.

https://priority.wiki/ is somewhere in between those two, in a way that seems valuable, but that doesn't quite fit with the functions I outlined above. It doesn't seem like it's aiming to be an exhaustive repository of content. But the individual topic pages also don't seem well-curated enough that I could just point someone to them and say "read all the stuff on this page to learn about the topic". The latter might change as more work goes into it, but I'm more hopeful about the EA forum sequences feature for this purpose.

The list of syllabi on EAHub is also interesting, and fits with the sequences function, albeit only on one specific topic (introducing EA).

Are those what you were referring to, or are there other places on EAHub where (object-level) content is collected that I didn't spot?

I think the movement might benefit from uncovering predictors of value drift / EA specific causes of mental health issues. It would be interesting to see how ideas propagate from the leaders to the followers.

Also, delegating all the surveys to the central planner might make them more well-thought and might make it easier to integrate the results of different surveys into conclusions.

Note that it is possible to do longitudinal analysis with the EA Survey, and we have done some in the past (such as for retention [EA · GW], GWWC pledge keeping [EA · GW], and changes in cause preferences [EA · GW]). I'd be happy to help walk people through how they can do their own longitudinal analyses and what the relevant caveats are.

EA's are focused a lot on learning, but are doing this inefficiently: they study alone, without a syllabus, often without peers, and without getting feedback and evaluation on their learning outcomes.

Solution:

There are many e-learning tools, much more than just MOOC videos, that can be used, although I'm not familiar with them. A learning community could be created within an existing e-learning platform.

People in EA are smart; a lot of value can be gained by facilitating people help each other through carefully designed learning programs. Q&A's with EA researchers whose work is on the syllabus could be arranged to minimize time needed for teaching. The e-learning course/community could also create structure and accountability to get things done, as well as assist students in signalling their EA-relevant knowledge and skills. For example, they could show they passed a course on 'creating good Fermi estimates'.

I know there was one Discord group for rationalists learning math that seemed pretty useful.

Separately, there's been a decent amount of work on AI specifically. I was personally matched with a few other people near me to learn about ML, and we did have several sessions, which was pretty nice.

I'd encourage more experiments here. One common thread (you'll likely see in several responses) is that I'd encourage you to think small at first, as in an MVP. Maybe some early versions would look like Slack/Discord groups for one specific niche.

If you (anyone reading this) are interested, I recommend applying to the EA Funds or similar. I imagine some interventions here may be quite cheap, but useful. I'd be happy to review your application or discuss if you do.

I'd encourage more experiments here. One common thread (you'll likely see in several responses) is that I'd encourage you to think small at first, as in an MVP. Maybe some early versions would look like Slack/Discord groups for one specific niche.

I totally agree with this sentiment. And I might do an experiment myself in the future :) I don't think funding is necessary for any of these experiments though.

What I like about their eventually being a platform/community to learn about EA-relevant stuff is:

It provides a Schelling point, which helps people find learning partners easier, which makes it more likely for learning groups to get started

It is scalable

It introduces people to knowledge that might be useful that they would not have found on their own

It makes it easier for less-connected people to get engaged

It provides more tools and offers some best practices, making it easy for groups to get more value out of the experience

It lowers the barrier to get started and could serve as a clear next step to become more engaged in EA

A URL shortening service. It would be nice if, for example, ea.link/sydney took you to the group page for Sydney, ea.link/cost-effectiveness provided a link to a nice landing page for reading more about cost effectiveness and ea.link/forum linked to the ea forum. The Czech EA association currently owns the ea.link URL, but no-one has picked up this project yet.

Cause prioritization is complex, and going through it takes time. The relevant considerations are often unstructured and require a lot of work to discover. This leads so sub-optimal cause prioritization. This can be done much better.

An interactive cause prioritization tool could help people go through relevant considerations. I am imagining something like the GPP’s flowchart, but where are asked only one question at a time.

Features could include:

Ability to save progress and return later

Insight into how other users answered the question

Ability to link to relevant arguments

It should ideally be community-driven (the community can suggest considerations, and the community can vote on the importance of a particular consideration).

This doesn't necessarily mean generating extra news articles about EA, but if a journalist already wants to write about EA or one of our main cause areas, I'd love if they had extremely reliable access to people who know how to talk to journalists, come up with pithy but accurate quotes, etc.

CEA helps EA organizations and groups with the basics of media interaction now, but we're basically reactive; we hear about people who want to do stories, and we talk to them or give advice to those who will be talking with them. I'd love to see something proactive, like a service journalists know they can use to get strong material on AI, poverty, and other such topics.

(This may be doable by having a few people join Help a Reporter, but there's still the question of having folks trained in media interaction.)

Incubators usually take founders and ideas together, whereas I like the Charity Entrepreneurship approach of splitting up those tasks, and that it would fit the EA community well.

I think there are opportunities for lots of high expected value startups, when taking the approach that the goal is to do as much good as possible, for instance:

1. Proving a market for things that are good for the world, like Tesla's strategy.

2. Identifying startups that could have high negative value if externalities are ignored, and trying to have an EA aligned startup be a winner in that space.

3. Finding opportunities that may be small or medium in terms of profitability, but have high positive externalities.

The difference between this and any other incubator is that this would not be measuring just profitability as its' main measure, but also working to measure the externalities of the company's, and aim to create a portfolio that does the highest good for the world.

My current guess is that there's not actually that much room for high-impact startups. It's really, really hard to successfully create a C-corp, let alone optimizing for strategy at the same time. Now that there is significant money available for nonprofit ventures, it seems much less of a draw than it used to.

There are almost no ideas I have for what very useful startups would look like, at least things that I wouldn't expect could be more effective as nonprofits (at least for the first few years).

Happy to be proven wrong of course! Also happy to provide feedback on specific ideas if people are interested.

I have the reverse intuition here. I think that in general while optimizing profit doesn't make sense, creating sustainable business models that fund their own growth provides many opportunities for impact that simply taking other peoples money doesn't.

One thing I'd note is that Guesstimate took quite a bit of time (maybe around 1.5 years engineering/PM time.) I'd guess is that if you were to try to pay for someone to make something similar, it could cost quite a bit (>$200k.)

It may be possible to start with simple Python library with some visualizations or similar.

Do you think that Guesstimate has not yet made $200,000 worth of value for the world? I'm legitimately unsure about this point but my priors say its' at least possible that it's added that much value in time saved and better estimates. I think that systems modelling could have similar impacts.

Impact assessments. I think our ability to do impact assesments are bounded by our tools (for instance, they were on average much worse before guesstimate). If EAs started regularly modelling complex feedback loops because there was a readily available tool for it, I think the quality of thinking and estimates would go up by quite a bit.

I think meditation is a very interesting medium for learning that we aren't using much yet. Guided meditation recordings are highly scalable and can be used to deal with specific challenges that (effective) altruists encounter, like these by Holly Morgan, or to teach elements from the Replacing Guilt Series.

I would be very interested in seeing someone do a few of these to test the idea. Plausibly, this only becomes effective once the EA has grown substantially in size.

Two other topics suitably for a guided meditation recording:

EA events (retreats, conferences) can be very exciting and very taxing, and the meditation could help to calm people down, refresh, process what's going on, set intention or reflect on one's intention, prioritize, etc.

Demotivated moments: sometimes EA feels like running against a wall - the effort just seems a complete waste, and it'd be nice to have some meditation to turn to. It could help people to deal healthily with setbacks by trying to learn from them, and then accepting whatever is.

I'd agree. I find these skills undervalued in EA compared to research.

That said, for research tasks, it's possible to do much of that in existing orgs; so the marginal new org may not be as relevant. If I instead asked, "what new research areas would you want to see investigated" I imagine I may have had a bunch of results.